Workshop “Tran Duc Thao and philosophy in Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century - some comparative studies”

The workshop was also attended by Mr. Claudio Digri - Ambassador of the Republic of Chile to Vietnam, Mr. Jorge Rondón Uzcátegui - Ambassador of the Republic of Bolivia to Vietnam. On the side of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, there was the presence of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Anh Tuan - Vice Rector of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Associate Professor Dr. Hoang Anh Tuan speaks at the conference

Professor Tran Duc Thao was born on September 26, 1917 in Tu Son district, Bac Ninh province, in a family of small civil servants. To date, he is the only Vietnamese philosopher who is famous in the scientific forum and is recognized as having international stature in the West. If we count the time he studied in France (in the late 30s and 40s of the last century) and his works written in French and printed in France, Tran Duc Thao is also a French philosopher. He is the only Vietnamese person in his generation who has a real path of philosophical education.

He was formally trained at the famous College of Pedagogy of Rue d'Ulm in Paris from March 1941 to September 1944 and had the opportunity to work in an elite French intellectual environment, having close contact with many philosophers who had great influence in philosophical activities in the second half of the 20th century such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Alexandre Kojève, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida... At the same time, his discoveries and ideas were recognized and highly appreciated by them as "unique contributions to the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics" (Daniel J. Herman). Tran Duc Thao is the only Vietnamese person to have a philosophical school named after him and is still being studied and researched by many scholars.

Mr. Claudio Digri - Ambassador of the Republic of Chile to Vietnam

With Marxism, Tran Duc Thao is considered to have contributed to developing dialectical materialism into humanistic dialectical materialism (Cu Huy Chu) which Marx created. In philosophy, he created a comprehensive system of thinking that continuously absorbs new things. For the first time, a philosopher of the Husserlian school, Tran Duc Thao, succeeded in combining Husserl's phenomenology with Marx's dialectical materialism.

For more than 40 years, he devoted all his time to realizing the Marxist methodology, making philosophy closely linked to life, closely attached to the fate of his people. Tran Duc Thao had a deep belief that Marxism was not a dogmatic theory, but must be a practical torch leading the way for the proletarian revolution. With that meaning, there is a complete basis to affirm that there is a philosophy named Tran Duc Thao and even more so “Tran Duc Thao’s thinking and style” – a great contribution of Vietnamese intelligence to humanity that the task of the Vietnamese generation after him is to shape, clarify its nature, origin, content and basic characteristics by deeply studying the valuable philosophical legacy he left behind.

Mr. Jorge Rondón Uzcátegui - Ambassador of the Republic of Bolivia to Vietnam

The workshop “Tran Duc Thao and Vietnamese philosophy in the second half of the 20th century: some comparative studies” focused on the creative ideas of philosopher Tran Duc Thao, creating momentum for in-depth research on his contributions, and highlighting two major lessons. Those are lessons about thinking methods and lessons about the personality of Vietnamese intellectuals.

Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Anh Tuan - Head of Philosophy Department presented the introductory report of the conference.

Nearly 60 articles participating in the conference focused on clarifying Tran Duc Thao's main topics of interest and some philosophical issues of interest in Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century and recent years.

The first is that Tran Duc Thao compares Husserl's phenomenology with dialectical materialism. The second major theme in Tran Duc Thao includes works on the transformation of Hegel's idealistic dialectic into Marx's materialistic dialectic, along with the role of Marxism in perceiving and transforming the world. The third theme includes research works that can be classified as Tran Duc Thao's dialectical materialism: how consciousness and thought appear in the great evolution of nature from matter, through organisms, to humanity. The fourth theme is related to the nature and formation of human beings, through which he also presents the evolutionary diagram of human history, from "primitive communist society" to "scientific communist society", through the transformation of intermediate production modes.